By Dan Morgan in Chile

In the first attempt to write a new constitution for Chile, the left and progressives were soundly beaten. With compulsory voting for the first time ever in reality, the draft constitution got just 38% of the votes. Now we are entering a second, emasculated process. The first thing to say about the defeat of September 2022 is that it was not forecast by anyone on the left. This shows that the left is out of touch with large sections of the people. The opinion polls got it right but they have been skewed to the right in the past, so we generally discounted them. The result was not an absolute disaster but has been felt as such by almost everyone.

REFERENDUM DEFEAT

Why was it not approved? The draft was very good, very progressive but it gave many people many reasons to reject it. These were ably used by a colossal propaganda campaign to get the 62% vote to reject. What were the main reasons?

Firstly the extensive use of the word “Plurinational”. 

Some history: In the past, the Chilean state waged two successful wars against a confederation of Bolivia and Peru. In the second, that ended in 1884, Chile conquered its three northern provinces and the immense wealth of nitrates first, then copper and now also lithium. At the same time, the genocidal conquest of the indigenous region in the south was finally achieved. The Mapuche people who had resisted the Spanish and then Chileans for 450 years, were reduced to ‘reducciones’ (reservations) on 10% of their land – and even some of that was later taken. The chauvinistic nationalism that is embedded in Chilean education follows from this. So nationalist feeling against ‘dividing the country’ and including other flags was strong.

The ‘Mapuche question’ is complicated. They receive some economic aid, and some land has been returned. Several radical groups use violent methods to try and force reparations, with limited support and more limited success. Enormous tracts of land in the area have been acquired by huge forestry companies and reparations are due; it’s a political problem. However, daily sabotage attacks on machinery, lorries and forestry workers themselves do not help win support. My Mapuche neighbours want a quiet life by and large, receive some benefits and do not want anti-Mapuche feelings stirred up. The vote to reject the draft was higher in areas with large Mapuche minorities than elsewhere (the radicals in the community do not vote of course).

Another important issue was the draft’s inclusion of the right to abortion – leaving details for later legislation. This opened the way for the ‘reject’ campaign to say it gave the unqualified right to abortion up to the time of birth. Obviously ridiculous, but it had some effect.

Animal rights were also included in the draft. Given the campaign against rodeos and other rural activities such as horse and greyhound racing, some rural voters strongly reacted against this.

The draft included the right to a home. This simple statement was distorted in radio spots especially, such that many people were convinced that their own house would be taken from them!

THE CAMPAIGN

What about the campaign? Little campaigning was done on the streets. The ‘Reject’ campaign spent massively, especially on radio spots. The main public campaign was television spots of 15 minutes every evening, divided evenly between the Approve and Reject campaigns.  Reject cleverly said “A new constitution?  Yes – but not this one”. It also used the main issues many people did not like.

The Approve campaign majored on the liberal ideas appealing to the mainly middle-class professionals who wrote the draft. It was very progressive but included little to promise a higher standard of living, except for promising many social rights. Economic issues such as ensuring real nationalisation of the big copper mines were not included (the present, Pinochet constitution retains national ownership of natural resources, but allows for them to be ‘leased’. So now, although the state company Codelco still exists - after 1971 it owned all the big mines – private, mostly transnational companies, now produce 67% of the copper.

So the draft was long on liberal issues and short on bread and butter issues. Conservative social prejudices are strong. In retrospect, the draft was politically naive, by spelling out loads of demands which are not universally popular, and not stressing those that are.

General discontent also played a role in the defeat. The government did not campaign for the draft, but was obviously associated with it. With a stagnant economy and inflation running at 13%, people were not happy – especially the majority, on low incomes – as food inflation was up to 22%.

TRIUMPHALIST RIGHT - WEAKENED LEFT

The political reaction has been awful. The left was demoralised for a time and still is to some extent.  President Boric, always on the right wing of the Broad Front, has turned to the right and is always taking about the need for consensus, broad agreements. This is disastrous as the right wing, with a narrow majority in Congress, is triumphalist and in no mood to compromise. They push ever harder to move the agenda to the right. They voted against even discussion of the tax reform, which is key to any hope of higher social spending. A pensions reform proposal has been carefully drafted to give the right few arguments against it but even so seems doomed.

The biggest social worry at the moment is the tremendous increase in very violent crime, something new to Chile. When Venezuela was at a very difficult moment, our ex-President Piñera went to the Colombian border there with Ivan Duque and invited all Venezuelans to Chile. Thousands arrived, not all of them decent workers. Gangs of organised criminals came, with ruthless methods – along with some Colombian hit-men, unemployed after the peace agreement there.

The big increase in murders and other violent crime was also a factor in the rejection of the constitution, part of the general discontent. In April, three policemen were killed and the right wing, helped by saturation news coverage, has rushed through congress a law giving police “privileged legitimate defence”, a virtual licence to kill. The first victim was a 19 year old lad who drove past a police check, knocking over a cop. He was gunned down with an UZI submachine gun.  Many judges already gave cops free rein; in my town, an unarmed young man was shot dead by a cop during the Covid curfew and the cop has just been declared not guilty. The situation will be much worse now – forgotten are the dozens left blind or partially blind, or killed during the social protests of three years ago.

To their credit, the communist and broad front deputies voted against this law. These are the parties of the original coalition of President Boric but he did not veto the law, negotiating instead a weaselly compromise.

I fear the worst if this sort of weakness continues. The neo-fascist José Antonio Kast stands to gain from popular discontent if the situation of the people does not improve. Meanwhile, we vote on 7th May for 50 members of a council to decide on a carefully delimited new constitution. Enthusiasm is very low but it is crucial that the left win at least a third of these seats, to stop the right wing making this one even worse than the present one, rigged in 1980 by the dictator Pinochet. This has been amended over the years but still gives the Constitutional Court the excuse to veto progressive changes on the grounds that they infringe “the right to property”.

Gabriel Boric President of Chile photo by Fotografoencampana

The Approve campaign majored on the liberal ideas appealing to the mainly middle-class professionals who wrote the draft. It was very progressive but included little to promise a higher standard of living, except for promising many social rights.